Black linework drawing of a coiled dragon with a long, spiked body and a sweeping wing shaded with a grey splatter effect, on a white background.

Coiled dragon design with a grey wash wing

Black and grey · Flash

A black linework drawing of a dragon with its head raised in profile, a long spined body coiled into a loop, and a sweeping wing with fine tapering lines. The wing is partly filled with a soft grey splatter wash, while the rest of the design uses solid black strokes and detailed scales. The drawing sits centred on a plain white background.

Dragon Wing Serpent Spine Scale Coil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You come up the harbour steps at Porthkerris with the tide still in your boots and the gulls already fighting over the bait barrels. Nobody on the quay will look you in the eye, because Ada Penhallow has been telling everyone since Tuesday that the dragon in the bay is back, and that the nets came up heavy with scale. You tell yourself it is a seal, or a shark gone soft in the head. You do not tell yourself anything about the grey wash of the water that morning, how it lay over the slate like a spilt wing.

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Your brother Tam is in the wheelhouse of the Morwenna, mending a snapped float with fishing twine and swearing at it quietly. He tells you the thing circled the Gull Rock twice before dawn, slow as a cart on a hill, its neck raised so high its head stood out of the fog. He says it watched the boat the way a cat watches a sparrow that has not yet decided to be a meal. He says it did not breathe fire. He says it simply looked, and that was worse.

So you take the Morwenna out past the rock with the sun coming red over Carn Du, and you drop the line where the water goes black, and you wait. The swell lifts and drops. A long shape slides under the hull, coil after coil, and the sea goes silver along its spines. You lean over the rail. The head rises beside the bow, close enough to see the fine ridges along its jaw, and it opens its eyes, which are the colour of wet slate. Tam says nothing. The net in your hands goes slack, light as a sleeve, and when you haul it in there is only one fish inside, a single mackerel, its belly split clean as a ledger line.